David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…I'd have to go buy really big businesses or buy businesses outright to deploy this much capital and I don't have access to that. These are the types of businesses we can buy and we buy smaller shares of them. Yup, so in 1967, he writes a letter to the partners saying, “I am out of step with present conditions. On one point however, I'm clear. I will not abandon a previous approach, the cigar butt investing strategy, whose logic I understand, although I find it difficult to apply in the current environment, even though it may mean foregoing large and apparently easy profits to embrace an approach which I don't fully understand, have not practiced successfully, and which possibly could lead to substantial permanent loss of capital. ” He’s mentally struggling here. Times have never been better and he's never been more worried. He is Ben Graham through and through at this point in his life. It's rule number one, don't lose money. Rule number two, see rule number one. Then you also have this thing going on where because everything is so tied to the purchase price rather than the betting that you'll be able to generate a positive outcome, his mood is tied to purchase prices. Even though everything's going up, he's looking at it like this sucks. I can't find anything attractive to buy. His mood is very much inverse of the market.…

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